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Al Gore "a piece of shit"? or was Stephen Fry right about climate?

It's buried a LONG way down, but I would like to recommend that you search through Stephen Fry's blog of November 19th Getting Overheated for his angry response (and subsequent hyper-remorse!) to a climate change denier.

He's right about one thing: his own argument is (largely) Pascal's Wager in ecological guise; you can spot that almost as soon as he starts his description of the debate.
He's also far too kind to his opponent, who is, quite spectacularly, dishonest in his argument. It's perfectly possible to say "I don't know" but having discovered you don't know, to remain ignorant is a deliberate act. Finding out the facts doesn't require a degree in climatology.

It was over dinner, and Fry clearly lost his cool in the argument, and felt he'd failed in his mission to clarify things. I think he did. Here's an extract from Fry's description of the "debate":

Jim now came to his central argument. "I'm not a scientist. I don't have the technical knowledge to determine whether this global warming is a real, man made threat or not. Do you?" Well I suppose Jim was accustomed to this argument appearing to be quite a clincher. Obviously very few people he meets are likely to reply that they do have the technical knowledge. What is more Jim could spread his hands wide and claim not to be a 'global warming denier' (a phrase that made him very angry indeed. He denounced it as 'that cliché', which is not quite what it is, but we'll let it pass). 'I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I'm not saying it does. I'm just saying I don't know.'

Read the extract, and you'll see that "Jim" is lying. He's not just saying "I don't know" at all. He's saying that the most likely explanation of the consensus amongst scientists, is that they are wrong, and that we'd be wrong to take them seriously.

Fry's counter-argument fails. He says that it's the stakes that count; if we get it wrong on climate change, the consequences are dreadful; so we'd better believe the scientists and spend the money switching from fossil fuels. Pascal's argument was that you'd better believe in God because as an atheist you gained nothing from being right and what you lose from being wrong was unthinkable.

That's abandoning the argument, Stephen. You're accepting that it's not possible to know the truth, and that only a scientist can claim to know. And you're also accepting that whatever "scientists" say is something that ordinary humans can discount because

I don’t think anyone can deny that it is the majority of scientists who believe that global warming a) exists and b) is caused by man’s industrial activity, pollution and energy consumption, but that doesn’t mean they are right. The vast majority of scientists in the first half of the nineteenth century thought disease was spread by smell. They were wrong.

Wrong, Stephen! It's not a parallel at all. It really takes very little reading to spot the difference between the unscientific state of "medicine" in the 1800s, and the incredibly detailed work being done by today's satellite-aided climatologists. Your oil/coal baron isn't just being dishonest; he's being deliberately dishonest. If he wanted to know the truth, the truth is accessible, and doesn't require a Nobel Prize to comprehend, either.

I first started studying this subject in the 1970s, when a lot of ecologists started predicting the heating trend we're now seeing. They said what was causing it, and what would happen. Anybody who wants to dig into the research can do so; to be ignorant now is to be deliberately ignorant

The alternative, of course, is that "Jim" is stupid. His handicap, and society elevates a handcap into privilege; but we don't have to give him points for that... he gets enough with his annual bonus from the energy company he works for, and which I think it's quite fair to mention. It may not (as you say) weaken his argument, but it certainly means that we should not take his argument at face value.

He doesn't want to know. The rest of us have no such excuse.